Human geography through the ages: from description to spatial science

Detail

The big picture: how the subject changed

• Human geography did not stay the same. Its main question changed with each age.
• Early question: "What is out there?" The answer was description.
• Middle question: "Why is this region different from others?" The answer was regional study.

• Later question: "What general laws decide where things are?" The answer was spatial science.

• NCERT's Table 1.1 puts these stages in this order: exploration and description → regional analysis → areal differentiation → spatial organisation.

• These stages overlap. A new approach did not fully replace the old one overnight.

Period	Approach	Core idea	Key question
Early colonial	Exploration and description	Discover and record new lands	What is there?
Later colonial	Regional analysis	Describe every aspect of each region	What is this region like as a whole?
1930s and inter-war period	Areal differentiation	Find what makes each region unique	Why is this region different?
Late 1950s to late 1960s	Spatial organisation (quantitative revolution)	Use numbers and laws to find patterns	What general rule explains this pattern?

Stage 1 — Exploration and description (early colonial period)

• Exploration and description: the approach in which geographers travelled to, mapped and wrote about newly found lands, mainly listing what they saw.
• Cause → process → result:
• Cause: European empires and traders wanted new lands, routes and resources.
• Process: explorers and geographers went out to find and record these lands.

• Result: encyclopaedic accounts of areas. These were long, fact-by-fact records of places, people, products and routes.

• Weakness: it listed facts but did not explain them. There was little theory.

Stage 2 — Regional analysis (later colonial period)

• Regional analysis: the approach in which every aspect of a region (relief, climate, soil, people, economy) was described in great detail.
• Logic behind it:
• Regions are parts of the whole earth.

• If we know each part fully, we will understand the whole.

• Result: detailed regional monographs (books on one region each).

• Weakness: it was still mostly description, just more organised.

Stage 3 — Areal differentiation (1930s and the inter-war period)

• Areal differentiation: the approach that tries to find what makes each region unique and why it is different from other regions.
• The focus moved from "describe everything" to "explain the difference".
• Alfred Hettner (Germany): saw geography as chorology. Chorology means the study of how things are spread out over the earth's surface. Hettner said the key topic was local differences from place to place [4].
• Richard Hartshorne (USA): wrote The Nature of Geography (1939; reprinted 1976). It was strongly shaped by German writers, mainly Hettner [3][4].
• In this view, geography studies areal differentiation as it really is. This means not just how single things differ from place to place, but how the total combination of features in each place differs from every other place [4].

• Hartshorne's view became the main school ("orthodoxy") of American geography for years [2].

• Idiographic view: the belief that each region is unique, so geography should describe single cases and not look for general laws. This was the weak point that critics later attacked.

Stage 4 — Spatial organisation and the quantitative revolution (late 1950s to late 1960s)

• Spatial organisation: the approach that looks for regular, mappable patterns in how human activities are arranged across space.
• Quantitative revolution: the name for this phase. Geographers used computers, statistics and even laws of physics to study human phenomena.
• How it worked (cause → process → result):
• Cause: geographers felt description could not explain anything.
• Process: they gathered numerical data, tested ideas with statistics and built models.

• Result: maps of patterns and general rules about location.

• Under this approach human geography was called "locational analysis", "spatial analysis" or "spatial science" [6].

Schaefer's attack on Hartshorne (1953)

• Fred K. Schaefer (Britannica calls him Kurt Schaefer) was a German-trained geographer at the University of Iowa [5][2].
• In 1953 he wrote "Exceptionalism in Geography" in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers [2].
• His argument:
• Science is about explaining things.
• To explain, you need laws. These are general statements of observed regularities that show cause and effect [2].
• "To explain the phenomena one has described means always to recognize them as instances of laws" [2].

• For geography, the main regularities are spatial patterns [2].

• He rejected Hartshorne's idiographic view that geography is an "exception" among the sciences.

• Positivism: the belief that knowledge should come from data that can be observed and tested, leading to general laws. Positivism was the philosophy behind this phase.

Where the revolution spread

• An early centre was the University of Washington, Seattle (USA), led by William Garrison and Edward Ullman [2].
• Their students Brian Berry, William Bunge, Richard Morrill and Waldo Tobler became leaders of the "new geography" [2].
• Field observation and map reading lost their central place. Statistical analysis became compulsory in geography degree courses [2].

Typical models of this phase

Model	Thinker	What it explains
Central place theory	Walter Christaller (Germany, 1933)	The number, size and spacing of settlements, and the services they provide, based on least-cost location [6]
Agricultural land-use model	J.H. von Thünen	Rings of farming around a market town, set by distance and transport cost [9]
Industrial location theory	Alfred Weber	Where a factory locates to keep transport and labour costs lowest
Gravity model	Borrowed from Newton's law of gravitation	Interaction between two places grows with their size and falls with distance (distance decay: the farther apart, the less contact)

• The von Thünen, Weber, Alonso and Christaller models are the foundation of location theory [9].
• Full content of these models is covered in the notes on human settlements and on secondary activities.

Spatial diffusion

• Spatial diffusion: the spread of an idea, technology or disease across space over time.
• Torsten Hägerstrand (Sweden, 1953): modelled how innovations spread.
• He added a spatial (place-based) part to older social and economic models of how information spreads [7].
• In his view, the main centres of innovation are usually the largest cities. New ideas move down the urban hierarchy (big city → smaller towns) and out to nearby areas [7].
• He was an early user of computer simulation. People were spread on a grid. The chance of two people meeting fell with distance [8].
• Mean information field: his idea for the chance of getting information from a source, which is higher close to the source [8].
• His main work came out in English as Innovation Diffusion as a Spatial Process (1967) [7].

Type	How it spreads	Sub-type	Example
Expansion diffusion	The trait spreads outward from its source. The source keeps it too.	Contagious: to nearby places, like ripples in water	COVID-19 spreading inside a city or district
		Hierarchical: from big centres to smaller ones, skipping places in between	Mobile phones: metros first, then towns, then villages
Relocation diffusion	Migrants carry the trait to a new place	—	Settlers carrying crops, language or religion to new lands

• Indian and world examples:
• Green Revolution seeds (from the mid-1960s): HYV (high-yielding variety) wheat and rice spread first in irrigated Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, then to other areas. This shows both contagious and hierarchical spread.
• Mobile phones: spread from big cities down to small towns and villages (hierarchical).
• COVID-19 (2020): jumped between big cities by air travel (hierarchical), then spread locally (contagious).

Legacy: from the quantitative revolution to GIS

• The quantitative phase gave geography numbers, models and computer methods.
• Today's GIS (Geographic Information System: computer software that stores, layers and analyses map data) and spatial analysis grew from this phase. See the note on remote sensing and GIS.

What came next (context)

• The quantitative approach was criticised for treating people like numbers and ignoring feelings, poverty and power.
• So in the 1970s came the welfare or radical, behavioural and humanistic schools. Then in the 1990s came post-modernism, which questioned grand general laws.

Prelims Hooks

• NCERT order of approaches: exploration and description → regional analysis → areal differentiation → spatial organisation.
• Trap (NCERT exercise): "quantitative revolution" is the name of a phase (spatial organisation, late 1950s to late 1960s). It is not listed as an approach in Table 1.1.
• Areal differentiation = 1930s and the inter-war period; linked to Hartshorne (The Nature of Geography, 1939) and Hettner (chorology) [3][4].
• Schaefer, "Exceptionalism in Geography" (1953), Annals of the AAG: attacked Hartshorne's idiographic (each region is unique) view and called for laws [2].
• Hägerstrand = Sweden = innovation diffusion; "mean information field"; English book 1967 [7][8].
• Contagious vs hierarchical are both types of expansion diffusion. Relocation diffusion needs migrants to move.
• Match the model: central places → Christaller; agricultural land-use rings → von Thünen; industrial location → Weber; interaction falls with distance → gravity model.
• Encyclopaedic accounts → exploration and description stage. "Knowing parts explains the whole" → regional analysis stage.
• Early centre of the quantitative revolution: University of Washington, Seattle (Garrison, Ullman) [2].

Mains Points

• Shift from idiographic to nomothetic (law-seeking) geography: Hartshorne's regional uniqueness (1939) gave way to Schaefer's call for laws (1953). This made geography a spatial science able to predict, for example where to place markets, schools and roads [2][3].
• Use in Indian planning: central place hierarchy helps plan growth centres and service centres. Gravity and diffusion models help plan connectivity and the spread of farm technology (Green Revolution) and health measures (COVID-19 containment zones targeting big centres first).
• Limits of the quantitative approach: it assumes rational people and even, flat land. It ignores culture, inequality and perception. This led to the radical, behavioural and humanistic schools of the 1970s. A good answer should show both what the approach added and where it falls short.
• Lasting legacy: statistics and models from this phase led to GIS and remote sensing. These now support disaster mapping, land records and urban planning.